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In between those two states, the other 48 fall in a positive correlation that, while not perfect, is quite undeniable. According to HSI's Edwin Ivanauskas, the correlation is stronger than that between household income and test scores, which have long been considered to be firmly connected to each other. The ACT scores were gathered from ACT.org, which has the official rankings and averages for the 2013 test, and the speed ratings were taken from Internet analytics firm Akamai's latest report.

It's relatively easy to generate cases where X can be caused by 2 different things, but the majority case simply has a stronger effect, if you don't account for mediating factors.

Let's take a case where everything is controlled by people so cause can be quite directly ascribed.Applying for US citizenship causes US citizenship.But among residents of the US, those applying for US citizenship are far less likely to end up being citizens than those who don't.

a bully beats up a kid and takes his money
the mom feels bad and gives more money back.

the causation case is that when the bully beats up the kid, he gets more money.

without knowing what the mom is doing there is no real correlation (ie, you can't say that everytime a kid gets beaten, a kid gets more money), only that there is causation of one to the other. If however, the mom is known, then you can say that everything this kid gets

It's also worth noting that ACT scores may not be the best metric for success.

In some states it's mandatory for high school students to take the ACT, which may lead to lower state averages (technically those lower averages are more accurate for the whole population, but still don't compare directly with states where only the best students take the test).

Moreover, SAT is more popular on the coasts. Many of my high-achieving friends (think West Coast Ivy League) never even took the ACT. With that in mind, how

That's true but the article (and even the summary) says that the correlation with internet speed is stronger than with income. So there may be more to it than just rich people can afford premium services.

Maybe families that value education more strongly are more likely to get broadband, or maybe there's is actually some causation.

Ratings are stupid. Of 50 states someone has to be #1 and someone has to be #50 and the slots in between* must be filled also. You could clone a billion Stephen Hawkings and replace the US population with them and somewhere would still be #50. It's just a trick used by politicians to extort more tax dollars from the populous.

Sure, take a good measure and if you're far away from the mean in the low direction, you probably need to reassess your education program and if you're well above, you're doing somethin

Big Data is finally paying off: now one can sift jillions of bytes for hundreds coincidental correlations that used to take marketing departments and politicians several years and millions of dollars to concoct manually.

Who woulda done thunk that one of the poorest states in the Union would also have shitty broadband and shitty test scores? I bet they have crazy high infant mortality, shitty health in general, and a high per-capita crime rate too.

Maybe the high infant mortality rate is what caused the shitty broadband.

Yeah, violent crime seems to go with density, rather than poverty. It's committed by the poor, but closely-packed poor rather than rural poor.

DC is ALL urban, every single inch of it, so it's not really appropriate to compare it to a state. It's mid-pack compared to other cities of comparable size; it fell between Indianapolis and Miami on the 2012 list (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012), and near Toledo and Nashville.

It's full of politicians and their hangers-on so it's going to suck in undesirable types like a sponge. I'm a "more guns, less crime" kind-of guy but even I think that that signal is swamped by other inputs in the case of DC

DC's violent crime rates are largely about its poverty. Aside from the federal government, it has no real industry. It was heavily populated by poor blacks fleeing the South during the civil war, and during the next century-plus they were heavily discriminated against. There were few jobs for them except at the very bottom of service. While the place is on average pretty wealthy, its real population is quite poor.

The real fail of the politicians was that for two centuries the federal government ran the plac

For fuck's sake... where in TFS or TFA was causation mentioned?Having a correlation between two data sets opens the door for more research on that matter. Nobody said "THIS is because of THAT", but rather "THIS and THAT scale similarly, hmm..." which is a totally different thing.

So this finding might be further correlated with the following:

- given the same amount of time spent on the Internet (say 1h/day as base value), the amount of information retrieved from the Internet scales with broadband speed.corre

Let's see if I can account for also factors that are just as like culprits for lower test scores in Missisippi

1. Unemployment rate, MA - 5.6 MS - 8.02. Average Income3. Disposable Income4. Parents that actually care about their children's education5. Belief in a supreme being6. Racial diversity?7. Bio-luminescence8. More Shore line per state volume9. BP retarded the state with an oil spill10. I just put this one in here for giggles11. Mississippi is used to space out counting closer to a single second12.

I mean somehow I doubt better access to broadband is going to solve Mississippi's education problems. I'm willing to bet Massachusetts kids were trouncing Mississippi kids long before the internet came along.

It's almost like (barely) developing nations with pitifully low levels of human capital formation also have pitifully low levels of infrastructure investment. Funny that. It's probably their way of making our victory in the civil war seem completely pointless.

There is also the fact that Mississippi is a lot larger than Massachusetts. It is easy to build high quality Internet connections in a state that is small, with almost all of its population concentrated on the eastern side. A larger state with less population, and population that is more scattered, with the biggest town being about 1/20 the size of Boston makes it a lot more expensive to sling fiber and provide access to residents, especially in a state with such a relatively low population density.

While Massachusetts has 858 people per square mile, the population density of Minnesota, 68.1, is almost identical to Mississippi, with 63.7 people per square mile.

U.S. Census data also shows a significantly higher percentage of residents with internet connectivity in both Minnesota and Massachusetts, and significantly lower percentage in Mississippi. (Sorry, the source, http://www.census.gov/prod/201... [census.gov], doesn't list the exact percentages, but I'm sure they

I'm sorry that such hell holes persist in 21st century USA, but that has nothing to do with my comment. We have fiber criss-crossing the entire state, including the remotest northern towns. Yes, the money may have originated primarily from the cities, but it's being spent statewide. And we have impoverished areas, But public money can only pull fibers just so far. We can't drag one up every driveway in the state.

If you want to fix your state, start by voting to raise taxes by an order of magnitude across ri

You can stop at "more $". That's the real reason why students in MA do better than students in MS.

Not money that's used to buy kids iPads or Surfaces, mind you. Money that's spent to modernize schools built in the 1960s, or tear them down entirely and put up new ones. Money that's spent to pay teachers more, and attract better teaching talent. Money that's spent on the community and infrastructure to make teachers want to live there.

Also, it's much more profitable for the private companies that "public" edu

The problem with homeschooling is that it's usually used not as a means to educate your kids better, it's most often used because you have a particular worldview you want them to be exposed to, to the exclusion of all others.

The problem with homeschooling is that it's usually used not as a means to educate your kids better, it's most often used because you have a particular worldview you want them to be exposed to, to the exclusion of all others.

What world view parents can teach their children is THE problem with homeshooling? And that's a problem you want managed by your government? I don't.

I don't think it's any of my business what the people across the street have for a world view, and they choose to homeschool? If the kids are learning how to read, write, do math, understand history and science what business is it of the government to impose a world view or a set of them to be taught? You think it's your business? How Orwellian of you.

Faster internet also means a larger cable bill. Maybe we are seeing inflated test scores because the people with faster internet are the people who can afford it along with better schools, private tutors, school supplies etc etc.

If there was any data to suggest the ACT tests are statistically valid (they test the thing you think they test) or reliable (they would get the same result if you tested again) then the correlation may be a clue to something. However when the underlying test is neither valid nor reliable, the correlation it shows doesn't even show you there is correlation.

The upshot: Even if a causal relationship corresponds to the study's findings, causes of state-level rates of test achievement are fundamentally different things than causes of student-level rates of test achievement.

You can find all sorts of weird correlations [tylervigen.com] if you look for them but the mere existence of a correlation is meaningless by itself. In this case my first question would be about money. States with more money will be able to afford both faster internet and better schools. Other factors that need to be controlled for include population density, local industry, demographic makeup, etc to be able to put some meaning to this.

Basically this is a meaningless correlation which provides no context to draw useful

The more waves --electromagnetic, wires, fiber-- the larger the opportunity for so called 'rub off' of thise waves. Actually the better-performing students do not know anything more than the average student, nor have better insights, higher intelligence (technically though, yes they do), etc. It's just that they 'pick up' more of the accepted view of the current state of knowledge. Morphic resonance.

The expense of the housing in which a student lives has been a great predictor of success in schools. Expensive dwellings indicate an ability to spend and that means that service providers will invest more in hopes of capturing an account. Such homes can spend freely for expensive services such as HBO, Showtime, alarm systems and being the phone service as well. Whereas poor communities simply can not afford such things.
It is not income levels that one measures. After all for the rich taxab

The ecological fallacy concerns making conclusions about individuals from aggregates (states).From Wikipedia,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy"An ecological fallacy is a logical fallacy in the interpretation of statistical data where inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from inference for the group to which those individuals belong.... The four common statistical ecological fallacies are: confusion between ecological correlations and individual correlations, confusion betwee

The students who take the ACT are not necessarily representative of the state's population. For example, I took the SAT, and not the ACT, because all the colleges I applied to accepted SAT results, but not all accepted ACT results. Students who were going to the local state school just took the ACT alone. I bet the reverse is true in different states. It doesn't take much thought to see these results are totally meaningless.

Hey, I nearly aced the SATs and walked out with a 2.53 GPA. Intelligence does not imply success. Tests were never my issue. I just dislike being herded around and if you don't get with the program, you don't go anywhere (except in rare cases). So what if I'm a modern jack-of-all-trades? I don't particularly want to spend my life hyperspecializing in something--and that's what you gotta do to make lots of cash. Then again, money ain't everything.

Give me an example of a memorization question from any standardized test?

Any questions like "Find the missing side of the triangle." rely on rote memorization of a specific procedure rather than a true understanding of why it works. Word problems are no better. Furthermore, multiple choice inherently constrains what answers someone can give, so writing out a detailed explanation of why and how something works is not possible.

These crappy tests simply do not care whether you understand the material.

Did your kid blow the SATs and so now you have to spend the rest of your life making excuses for their failure?

Did you do well on standardized tests and so now you're desperate to defend them?